Names names names

For some reason I was thinking about names this morning.  Just about everybody has three of them, first, middle and last -- why?  What's wrong with one UNIQUE name?  This is true for most cultures -- although I guess Arab cultures have several names depicting lineage, tribe, village or suchlike.  And is it the Chinese who say their family name first?  

Sometime in the Middle Ages, when local populations began to grow, it became useful to differentiate between all the Johns -- there was the John who was Ander's son, and the John who was John's son, and the John who was Peter's son.  There was the John who was the miller, and the John who was the baker.  Not sure if this is true of other cultures.  And I don't know why these family names began being handed down through the generations.

And what about numbers?  Do you know anybody with a number in his name?  Neither do I.  There's a French musician who calls himself "Alfred 23 Harth" but his real middle name is Vincennes.  Somehow he got "vingt-trois" out of that.  But you never meet anyone called "K8" or "Bi11."

The "everybody has 3 names" thing is very American. In the UK, 2, 3 and 4 names are all quite common. When you start on the upper-crust, they sometimes go for a whole slew of names: Prince Willie is actually William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor, and that's a pretty modest collection for the aristocracy. I have 3 forenames, and I'm just a working-class peasant. Pain in the ass to come to this country and be asked for my "middle initial". I've got 4 initials, there isn't one in the middle.

Names like William Patrick James Henry John are mainly used to honor dead forebears, so far as I know. Tho' why this is desireable is beyond me.

The African-American community in the past 20-30 years has adopted a much more sensible approach, in my view, by making up new unique names which carry no generational baggage. There's Latowanda and Shawnasola and (my personal favorite) Latrina. If parents were tasked with thinking up pretty-sounding but unique names I think everybody would benefit. There are too many Scotts and Jennifers and Brents in the world. BOOOring.

Hell, even barcoding -- with a unique 14-digit number for every human on the planet -- would be preferable. How're you doing, 14655801254221?

One again, I feel deprived. I only have two names.

The clerk who filled out the birth certificate made a mistake, but it wasn't known until I was six years old and started school. When my parents sent for a copy of my birth certificate, they found out that my intended middle name (Howard) had been entered on the form as my first name and no middle name was entered. It was common in my family, at least when I was a kid, to call children by their first and middle names (yeah, like Billy Bob), so it was many years before my family started calling me by just my official first name. But up until she died, my mother would occasionally call me by my intended first and middle names.

Don't keep us in suspense.

Kenneth.

What's the frequency?

243.0 MHz

Prohibited -- use 406 MHz

I got stuck in a time warp. 243.0 was the emergency freq we used (of course, we also used vacuum tubes in the radios).